A Brief History of Thinking Machines

Chapter 3: Pioneering Progress in the 1960s

The third installment on the history of thinking machines.

The 1960s marked a pivotal developmental period for machine learning, transitioning from theoretical foundations towards practical applications. While previous decades established critical conceptual building blocks, the 1960s featured working systems tackling real-world challenges through learned pattern recognition, problem solving, motion control and more.

A pioneering achievement arrived in 1960, when engineering students created the Stanford Cart. This remote-controlled vehicle demonstrated emerging capabilities for video-based navigation.

The Stanford Cart was an early mobile robot platform. Originally constructed in 1960–1961 by Stanford graduate student James L. Adams, the cart was a basic wheeled platform with onboard cameras and radio controls to allow remote driving. Adams used the cart to study the effects of communication latency on teleoperated vehicle control, showing fundamental limitations when delays approach a few seconds. The cart later found use in pioneering autonomous driving experiments at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in the mid-to-late 1960s.

The initial work on the Stanford Cart was motivated by questions around controlling remote lunar rovers. Adams had been working on NASA’s Project Prospector, which assumed a Moon rover could be teleoperated from Earth by a human driver using…